Weathernews Inc. Japan, the owner of Sunnycomb and Weathermob apps, is striking a new partnership with Paris-based Netatmo to use data from its home weather sensors for crowdsourced forecasts. Read More

Goodservice wants to give users in India a personal assistant in their smartphone. The Mumbai-based app just scored seed funding of $1.6 million from Sequoia Capital, which it will use to increase the size of its engineering and operations teams. Read More

Offpeak, a Malaysia-based restaurant booking startup, has raised a Series A round of $800,000 led by Gobi Partners. The company will use its new capital to expand into Southeast Asian cities, starting with Bangkok, and find more restaurant partners. Read More

Online-to-offline (O2O) commerce and providing ultra-speedy local deliveries are two of Alibaba’s main growth targets. Now the e-commerce giant is significantly increasing its commitment to both verticals. Alibaba and subsidiary Ant Financial announced today that they will each put RMB 3 billion (about $483.3 million) into a joint venture called Koubei. Read More

With its high smartphone penetration rate, extremely speedy broadband, and government support, South Korea’s startup ecosystem is one of the most notable in Asia. SparkLabs, one of Seoul’s top accelerators is hoping its fifth batch will produce new success stories (alumni include online beauty product retailer Memebox, another one of Korea’s top-funded startups). Read More

If you care about tech news in Asia — and you should! — then the chances are that not only do you read us here at TechCrunch — thanks and hi! — but you might also be aware of Tech In Asia. Well, today is an interesting day for our friendly rival which just raised $4 million. Read More

There’s no doubting Eton’s grip on the British establishment. The number of U.K. Prime Ministers who were educated at Eton College is 19 (by Wikipedia’s count). So how does a rarified public school maintain the bounded privileged of its selective, fee-paying education while also topping up its profits by widening access to its teaching methods? Online that’s how. Read More

Remember Pepper, the intelligent robot that SoftBank unveiled in Japan last year? Pepper goes on sale in Japan this coming weekend, but in advance of that launch SoftBank has revealed that Alibaba and manufacturer Foxconn have invested $118 million each in its robotics division. Read More

Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba held the largest IPO in U.S. history last year, but going public isn’t all sweetness and roses for every Chinese tech firm. In fact, a resurgent public market coupled with increased private equity has made the ideal of listing domestically — or, not being public in the U.S. — more appealing. Read More

Southeast Asia-based VC firm Monk’s Hill Ventures has welcomed a big name investor to its list of LPs after Yahoo Japan, the internet portal and $24 billion valued joint venture between Yahoo and SoftBank, invested an undisclosed amount into its inaugural fund. Read More

Commuting in Beijing is an endurance test, but a startup called Ubo wants to make life a little easier for drivers. The app connects users with valets at service stations in the city, who then drop off the car at a parking spot. Ubo has just raised $900,000 in funding from HGDS Capital, bringing its total funding so far to $1.42 million. Read More

Alibaba’s logistics arm is opening refrigerated distribution centers for fresh groceries in three major Chinese cities. Located in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the warehouses will not only allow Alibaba to meet growing demand for grocery deliveries, but also help it better compete against rivals like JD.com, which has invested heavily in its own logistics system. Read More

TechCrunch has come a long way in 10 years. As well as covering the most important tech news from the U.S. and Europe, we very much into Asia. We have two writers in the region — Catherine Shu and yours truly — but, beyond covering news from Asia, we want to show case startups from this part of the world. Read More

India is one of Android’s fastest-growing markets, but its extremely low credit card penetration rate is a challenge for Google as it goes after sweet, sweet app revenue. The tech giant is taking steps to make it easier for people to purchase from Google Play, however, and the latest is the launch of prepaid voucher cards. Read More

China’s taxi app war is about to enter its second era. Just days after a leaked memo showed Uber is raising $1 billion solely for its business in China, Bloomberg reports that Didi Kuaidi — China’s largest taxi app company, courtesy of a recent billion dollar merger — is out to raise $1.5 billion. Read More

Are we headed for yet more price wars in the world of cloud computing? Amazon and Google have made huge inroads into the market on the back of deep discounts and generous storage allowances, and as a measure of their competitive threat, today one of the bigger and older incumbents out of Europe announced a partnership that it hopes will help it fight back.
Germany’s Deutsche… Read More